♫♪ Hiroshi Yoshimura (吉村弘) - Music for Nine Post Cards [excerpts]

Bless…Root Strata co-founder Maxwell August Croy and Spencer Doran of Visible Cloaks have come together to launch a new publishing project called Empire of Signs (name assumedly coming from Roland Barthes 1970’s meditation on Japanese culture The Empire of Signs).

Their first record, out in November, is a reissue of ambient composer Hiroshi Yoshimura’s 1982 LP Music for Nine Post Cards, which was originally released by Japan’s Sound Process as the first installment of the label’s three-part Wave Notation series. For aural reference, Wave Notation’s small roster also included two other LPs: Erik Satie (France 1866-1925) by Japanese pianist Satsuki Shibano, and Still Way by Yoshimura’s frequent collaborator Satoshi Ashikawa.

Each of the three released tracks, streamable below, manifest their titles in an almost onomatopoeic way. Still water; slow dancing through the night; dreaming dreams, endlessly. I can see it—songs as sounding stories of Yoshimura’s life. Read up on this release, Yoshimura, the project, et. al here!